What a great read. Thanks for posting this!
> Pirates essentially changed the studio's whole identity, something that was incredibly hard to do even in those days.
There are indeed very few examples I can recall of a game that completely changed a studio, but one that comes to mind is Worms. Team 17 mostly made top down shooters and fighting games, until they released a silly trajectory shooting game inspired by the ancient basic game, Gorilla. That was such a massive success they mostly only made Worms games after that
Nitpick: not Gorilla.bas; it was the actual OG, Artillery. Prototypes, which used sprites ripped from Lemmings, were even named "Lemartillery".
And the creative bankrupcy of T17 is a whole another topic. I would rather suggest that they lucked into Worms when Davidson approached them by happenstance, and would not survive otherwise.
Scorched Earth always comes to mind as an influential early artillery game, but it too was PC, so hard to say.
I actually remember it's stupid tagline better than the name, "The mother of all games" indeed. But that is what I was searching for to get the name.
At least some reviews for Worms mentioned Scorched Earth (in superlatives too). It was big enough that systems that didn't have it, wish they had it.
Yeah Worms was coded on Amiga computers in a part of the world that was extremely Amiga heavy so it’s unlikely Gorillas.bas is the reference point.
https://www.lemonamiga.com/game/tanx 1991 is what came to mind for me.
Worms were such great games. I just had a look at what Team 17 is up to now and [they're doing surprisingly well.](https://www.team17.com/) Some great games in their portfolio.
Epic also did really well changing with the times. From Jazz Jackrabbit to one of the largest developers in the world.
Also remember the guys who made Commander Keen.
Yeah, did they ever go on to do anything else?
:-D
They worked on one thing forever
The author, Bruno Dias, has a blog[1] where he often discusses games and game design, especially from a narrative perspective; he worked as a Narrative Designer for Failbetter, the studio that did the Fallen London/Sunless Seas/Sunless Skies games. I check in on it somewhat regularly, he organizes his thoughts on the topic quite well.
[1]: https://azhdarchid.com/